4 Tips for Empathetic & Ethical Marketing

The bedrock of our work at Murphy Marketing is storytelling. We want to draw readers in with narratives they resonate with: not to force them to buy products or services, but to give them a humanized experience.
 

Marketing can get a bad rap, with its stereotypes of annoying ads and incessant, coercive sales emails. 

When people try to hold someone’s attention, convince them of something, or just have them listen for 30 seconds, the tendency is to convince rather than connect. To manipulate, rather than invite. 

It’s easy to spot the times that marketing campaigns do this without trying to hide it – think of big cell company commercials, for example. They call one another out, make disputable claims (speaking from experience…T-Mobile does not have service in all the places their maps show), and sell deals that eventually have us paying more than if we’d stuck with our old plan. We tolerate those commercials for the sake of watching March Madness, but we don’t really trust those companies. 

But marketing can also exude kindness and thoughtfulness in a way that makes a huge difference for how your audience feels about your brand – and about themselves.

 This relates to the thesis of Murphy Marketing:

“We help businesses tell a different story that brings light and not fear. Marketing should bring solutions to problems, not evoke anxiety or FOMO in the audiences we serve.”

Telling a “different story” often allows our audience to see parts of themselves within the narrative. People crave feeling seen, and they also enjoy picturing themselves in a different scenario. Storytelling helps them experience both. 

But there’s a catch: While marketing with empathy and honesty is a much better alternative to manipulative marketing, we can take it too far.

We want to hold the attention of our audience, so we engage their emotions rather than selling them false information – which is a great thing! But it’s easy to get swept away and lean too hard into the emotional conversation that can become equally manipulative.

We can over-use empathy to the point that we’re less concerned with whether our story is providing value and connection with our audience, and more concerned with getting a reaction.

Some companies deal with high-stakes situations – maybe yours is one of them. When you think about the story your customer may live in, it could have intense consequences! They could go bankrupt, have their roof fall in, or lose their job if they don’t work with you. But using those worst-case scenarios for your messaging could incite fear more than anything else.

The good news? You don’t have to make empty promises or prey on your audience’s emotions. There’s a third option that makes space for honesty and kind storytelling. Here are some hallmarks of more ethical marketing practices you can implement for your company:

1. Provide Value 

   More than anything else, providing value is a crucial step in marketing well. We are big fans of telling a story (it can even be an emotional story!) but don’t leave the audience there. Give them something to do with the information you’ve just shared. Whether you have a free sample of your work, a guide to get them started on their journey with you, or tangible next steps to make a purchase. Our goal is to provide dignity to our clients, which means giving them agency in the story we’re telling them. Get creative with how your own company could do this! 

2. Understand your why 

   It can be easy to get lost while trying to empathize with your audience if you don’t really know where you’re headed. For example, you may know that your audience is property owners in the midwest, and it’s easy to call out the fears they may have. But you can easily lean into their fears too much if you don’t have a solution or a defined reason for why you’re talking about that in the first place. 

3. Evaluate your own feelings (how does your copy make you feel?)

   A practical way to “test” your marketing materials is to read them out loud to yourself. Try to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and see how your content makes you feel. Recognize whether you walk away from that experience feeling negative, nervous, confused, hopeful, excited, or comforted – and make a plan to adjust your materials accordingly. 

4. Focus on the short-term

   If you’re stumped about how to express the stakes of your customer’s situation without being too doom and gloom, you may be focusing too much on the long term consequences they could experience if they don’t work with you. 

   Instead, try shifting the focus to short term stakes. For example, the most extreme long term failure if someone doesn’t work with Murphy Marketing could be that their business fails due to poor marketing. But that’s an intense claim, and not one we feel comfortable making! We prefer to emphasize the short term stakes, which are simply that they will continue to be frustrated over trying to communicate what their business does.

    

If thinking about empathy and manipulative marketing and storytelling is a lot to take in – don’t sweat it. There’s space to grow, and there’s help along the way! We’d love to chat if you have more questions about how to engage in ethical marketing practices.